Author Archive
Posted on December 8th, 2011 at 1:07 pm by AccentureNL
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Theme: Business Transformation, Latest Post | Tags: CIO, Cost reduction, Financial Services, High Performance IT, Information technology
Blog post written by Anke Schlichting. Anke is a former blogger on Blogpodium and Financial Service Technology lead Accenture Netherlands till January 2012.
The imperative to reduce costs is hardly new. However, economic uncertainty has major implications for companies’ efforts to achieve and sustain high performance and has inevitably put cost reduction back on the senior management agenda. With costs again under sharp focus, much of the exploration to find savings will inevitably fall on IT—which is both a significant cost center and a driver of costs (and cost savings) in the business, and therefore a major target for cost reduction initiatives.
Reactive and Strategic approach
For CIOs facing today’s intensifying focus on IT costs, now is the time to examine a new approach to IT spending. Hereby, the CIO faces the challenge of trying to find ways to reduce costs in IT, while maintaining service and delivering the technology investments required to support the business efficiency. Their task of reducing costs is often made even more complicated by the traditional reactive approach to discretionary IT spending.
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Posted on December 5th, 2011 at 2:45 pm by AccentureNL
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Theme: Analytics, Business Transformation, Column, High Performance IT, Latest Post | Tags: Analytics, business process outsourcing, Cloud, DCS, Information technology, infrastructure service, ISA95
Blog post written by Richard Schouten. Richard is a former blogger on Blogpodium and Plant Automation Solutions Lead Chemicals & Natural resources till January 2012.
Information technology has become increasingly more integrated into maintenance. But the advantages are not yet visible. Most often, it is seen as an administrative burden. Yet, further integration of information technology will be necessary in the future to deliver visible results.
Research by the US Department of Energy has shown that the shift from preventive and corrective maintenance to predictive maintenance offers a number of advantages, such as lower maintenance costs, downtime reduction and increased production. However, it requires quite an investment in time and money to realize vertical integration of the current systems.
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Posted on November 9th, 2011 at 1:03 pm by AccentureNL
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Theme: Analytics, Business Transformation, Latest Post | Tags: banking, Customer Analytics, Customer insights, customer loyalty, Customer relationships, Customer retention, Finance, Financial Services, High Performance IT, self-directed customer, Service provider
Blog post written by Anke Schlichting. Anke is a former blogger on Blogpodium and Financial Service Technology lead Accenture netherlands till January 2012.
As banks are still returning to more orderly trading positions in the aftermath of the financial crisis in early 2009, it becomes clear that they are now operating in a new environment. An environment where the economic fundamentals are changing, and even more significantly, so is the customer.
Expectations of customers globally are accelerating, with Accenture’s 2009 Customer Service Survey indicating that these have risen faster across service sectors in the last 18 months than in the previous five years, and that two in three consumers globally switched service providers in some sector during the last year. Accenture recently conducted the “Customer 2012″ Banking survey among 50 senior retail banking executives at major banks globally. The survey results describe a new world for banking in which the customer has finally taken control of center stage.
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Posted on July 7th, 2011 at 3:46 pm by AccentureNL
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Theme: High Performance IT, Latest Post | Tags: chrome, chromebook, chromeos, cloud, cloudcomputing, google, hardware as a service, html 5
Blog post written by Coert van den Thillaart. Richard is a former blogger on Blogpodium and is since 2004 active in the middleware area (EAI, SOA, EDA etc.) at Accenture Netherlands.
Since June,
ChromeBooks have become available to the general public with Samsung and Acer selling them. ChromeBooks are netbooks or ultraportables that run Google ChromeOS. And it’s this OS that makes these ChromeBooks interesting.
ChromeOS is an custom built version of Linux that basically is nothing more that the Chrome browser we use on our desktops. Even thought the ChromeBooks have internal storage there is no filesystem, actually there is no local anything. Local storage is used for caching only. The concept behind ChromeBooks and ChromeOS is that everything happens in the Google cloud. The applications you use, the music you want to listen to, the files you store, everything. Even though Google has a decent set of applications available and an application store to get more this concept does provide some limitations. Because not everything you may want to use is available (yet). So where is the appeal? Read more…
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Posted on April 26th, 2011 at 3:49 pm by AccentureNL
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Theme: Driving Growth, Marketing | Tags: Bank, Financial Services, Insurance, Sales, Service, Social CRM, Social Media
Blog post written by Robert Neumann. Robert is a former blogger on Blogpodium and is a Consultant within Accentures CRM Service Line with a focus on Sales Transformation.
“Social CRM isn’t just another communication channel to market”.
Following-up on my last blog entry, I found a blog about the current status of social CRM and where it could go next: Social CRM at a crossroads? According to the author social CRM evolved from an innovative new tool used by a few companies to a mainstream functionality that practically all companies use (in one way or another). The big question is what to do with it now and how to really create value with this new technology?
The author outlines three main possibilities:
- A new communications channel, used to communicate and market to new customer groups, but doing it mainly from the perspective of the company (and not the customer).
- A new social CRM technology solution, implemented in order to follow the crowd and “have it”, but failing to create real value.
- A way to co-create value together with customers, incorporating the perspective of the company, the customer and their touch points. Based on this understanding value can be created for both parties.
While the author sees the third option as the only one providing sustainable success for companies implementing social CRM, Dutch banks and insurance companies are still very much figuring out which way they would like to go. I do recognize abovementioned options one and two among them, but have not yet seen anything that really goes beyond that.
And this is the step a lot of companies need to start thinking about right now. The emergence and increasing usage of social media and other Web 2.0 tools has dramatically altered the ways in which companies interact with their customers. If they want to make social CRM something sustainable or something more than just the next hype, they need to make it more than a communication channel or another CRM functionality. They need to make it part of their overall CRM concept, something that is fully incorporated in their sales and service strategy. Companies should adopt a “social CRM” strategy.
I’m very much looking forward to the first Dutch bank or insurance that manages to do that. Or, even better, help to develop and implement it.
What do you think is next? What should companies do to respond to these changes?
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Posted on April 7th, 2011 at 5:26 pm by AccentureNL
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Theme: High Performance IT, Latest Post | Tags: CSS3, High Performance IT, html, html 5, hypertext, IT, Javascript, w3c
Blog post written by Coert van den Thillaart. Coert is a former blogger on Blogpodium and is since 2004 active in the middleware area (EAI, SOA, EDA etc.) at Accenture Netherlands.
Over the last year you may have heard of HTML 5. Within the IT community there is a lot of buzz surrounding it. The most prominent is probably Apple no longer wanting to support Flash on their mobile devices in favor of HTML 5. So what is it and why should you care?
Let’s start with the boring background. HTML (the HyperText Markup Language) is the language that is used for webpages. It’s a fairly simple and limited text markup language. The hypertext name comes from the ability to use hyperlinks to jump to other parts in the text or other pages. The HTML ‘code’ is parsed by the browser and that results in the webpages we all know and love. HTML originated in 1993 and has been the de-facto standard for pages on the web. While initially the standard developed quite frequently, the latest version (4.01) was released in 1999. So the last update was 12 years ago. An update seemed long overdue.
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Posted on December 13th, 2010 at 2:40 pm by AccentureNL
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Theme: Marketing | Tags: Bank, Facebook, Financial Services, Hyves, Insurance, Sales, Social Media
Blog post written by Robert Neumann. Robert is a former blogger on Blogpodium and is a Consultant within Accentures CRM Service Line with a focus on Sales Transformation.
When working in the Dutch Financial Services industry today it is fascinating to see the increasing interest of FS companies in social media. Having made it through the financial crisis, a lot of these companies are currently focusing on aligning their sales channels with today’s digital and mobile environments, one important and ever growing aspect of this being social media.
Having this in mind and being triggered by a recent news item stating that Facebook is now the leading social network in 115 of the 132 countries they are active in, I wanted to find out how Dutch financial services companies are doing on Facebook and the current no. 1 in the Dutch market, Hyves (about three times as large as Facebook).
Focusing on the top 3 banks and insurers my quick research revealed a surprisingly large room for improvement:
- On Facebook all of the top Dutch banks have a company page, but hardly go beyond a simple description taken from Wikipedia. The combined crowd of people who like these pages does not pass the 2000-person mark (equaling a certain lack of interest and popularity, at least compared to a Dutch Facebook champion KLM with almost 85.000 people liking their page). Most insurance companies are a bit further with their Facebook pages and are managing them actively with the use of a public “wall”, photos and events. In contrast to these activities stand the rather low numbers of people who like these pages, being often less than 100 persons.
- On Hyves this picture is only slightly more diverse. While most banks and insurers do not have an official Hyves page, the Rabobank currently manages a community of about 350 members and is offering product-specific forums, testimonial videos and specific marketing activities leading to their own website. Read more…
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Posted on November 8th, 2010 at 10:12 am by AccentureNL
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Theme: Cloud, High Performance IT | Tags: cloud, integration as a service, SaaS
Blog post written by Bas van Hengstum. Bas is a former blogger on Blogpodium and is an Integration Architect at Accenture Netherlands with a great interest for Cloud Computing.
Cloud Computing enjoys an increasing popularity, and more types of services arise in the Cloud. Traditionally there was a relatively
short list of Cloud services consisting of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas) and Software (or: Application) as a Service (Saas). Nowadays we start running out of acronyms, as services such as Process as a Service (PRaaS), Storage as a Service (also SaaS), Integration as a Service (also IaaS) and Enterprise Service Bus as a Service (ESBaaS) have been added. This trend of having every thinkable service in the Cloud has even evolved into
Everything as a Service (EaaS, XaaS or *aaS).
With my background in Integration Architecture, I wrote this article to provide insight in the world of Integration as a Service and to introduce an Integration-as-a-Service Offerings Model.
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Posted on August 5th, 2010 at 1:47 pm by AccentureNL
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Theme: Best place to work | Tags: future-of-hr
Blog post written by Thomas Mulder. Thomas is a former blogger on Blogpodium and Accenture’s HR Director The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg till January 2012.
The struggle of HR for a seat at the table is unmatched in many organizations.
While occupied in a safe environment focused on administration, reporting, employee matters and management support, many HR professionals proclaim the ambition of wanting to be a strategic business partner. Not only is it important that HR professionals will realize their personal ambition; A profound HR perspective is crucial for a people strategy that generates true competitive advantage.
Historic Challenge
Our economy is facing unprecedented challenges. We are in the midst of a digital revolution, the Internet revolution has only just begun, aging baby-boomers are struggling with Generation Y and we are in the midst of a climate and economic crisis. From a professional human resource and organizational development standpoint these developments could hardly be better;-) Organizations are in desperate need of a culture that fosters innovation and creativity on all levels. And organizational structures need to adapt to outsourcing and globalization.
Value HR
How does this affect the area of HR? First of all – as progressive businesses as Google and Microsoft start to understand – talent is the critical success factor for growth, market share and innovation. Also Accenture’s CEO confirmed that the talent and the capability to deliver are their differentiators in the marketplace. In an environment where talent is the sustainable competitive advantage, developing people effectively is equal to immediate value creation.
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